Chinese Tourists Given Tips On How To Behave

Authorities give advice to travellers such as do not to pick your nose, steal plane life jackets or leave footprints on toilets.

Chinese authorities have issued tourists with a handbook telling them how to behave when going abroad, including not to pee in pools.

As tourists from China increasingly travel abroad, they have developed a stereotype of “uncivilised behaviour”, which Vice Premier Wang Yang said in May “damaged the image of the Chinese people”.

The image-conscious National Tourism Administration has now published the 64-page Guidebook for Civilised Tourism, including illustrations, aimed at reining in unruly behaviour.

Instructions include do not pick your nose in public, leave footprints on public toilet seats or steal life jackets.

The rulebook explains that if tourists take the safety device from under their plane seat “if a dangerous situation arises then someone else will not have a life jacket”.

It also warned travellers to keep their nose-hair neatly trimmed and, if they had to pick their teeth, never to use their fingers.

The handbook also dispensed country-specific advice: Chinese visitors to Germany should only snap their fingers to beckon dogs, not humans.

The government had previously issued pithy guidelines telling tourists how to behave, but the latest booklet elaborated in far more detail.

Several countries, including debt-laden European nations, have eased visa restrictions to attract increasingly affluent Chinese tourists, but reports have also emerged of complaints about etiquette.

And the issues also affect tourists travelling closer to home. A woman from mainland China who in February had her son relieve himself in a bottle in a crowded Hong Kong restaurant sparked an outpouring of anger online, with some locals deriding mainlanders as “locusts”.

The handbook, published to coincide with a week-long public holiday that started on October 1, has been met with a mixed response.

A tour guide surnamed Zhang, based in Hong Kong, said his company had given him a copy of the rules at the start of the seven-day October holiday.

Before this he said they had distributed a much briefer set of guidelines – which fitted onto a single sheet of paper.

“I feel things need to be improved,” he said, standing in the city square packed with mainland tourists.